haydn studies - The Library of Congresscatdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/97041722.pdf · haydn...

The advances in Haydn scholarship made in the past forty years or so, and in par-ticular in very recent times, would have been unthinkable to earlier generations,who honoured the composer more in word than in deed. Haydn Studies dealswith many new aspects of a composer who is perennially fresh, concentratingprincipally on matters of reception, style and aesthetics and presenting manystriking new readings of the composer’s work. Haydn has never played a majorrole in accounts of cultural history and has never achieved the emblematic statusaccorded to composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Stravinsky, in spite of hisradical creative agenda: this volume attempts therefore to broaden the base ofour understanding of the composer.

. is a Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Heis author of Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 50 in the series Cambridge MusicHandbooks.

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Haydn Studies .

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The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom http://www.cup.com.ac.uk

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© Cambridge University Press 1998

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

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no reproduction of any part may take place without

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First published 1998

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Haydn studies / edited by W. Dean Sutcliffe.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 521 58052 8 (hardback)

1. Haydn, Joseph, 1732–1809 – Criticism and interpretation.

I. Sutcliffe, W. Dean.

ML410.H4H44 1998

7809.92–dc21 97–41722 CIP MN

ISBN 0 521 58052 8 hardback

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Contents

Preface [vii]

Editor’s note [xiii]

11 The consequences of presumed innocence: the

nineteenth-century reception of Joseph Haydn [1]

12 Haydn’s sacred vocal music and the aesthetics of salvation [35]

13 Sentiment and sensibility in La vera costanza [70]

14 Haydn as Romantic:

a chemical experiment with instrumental music [120]

. .

15 Haydn’s ‘Cours complet de la composition’

and the Sturm und Drang [152]

16 Haydn’s reversals: style change, gesture

and the implication-realization model [177]

17 Haydn’s symphonies between Sturm und Drang

and ‘Classical style’: art and entertainment [218]

18 The Haydn piano trio:

textual facts and textural principles [246]

.

19 Papa Doc’s recap caper: Haydn and temporal dyslexia [291]

10 Haydn: the musicians’ musician [321]

Index [335]

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Preface

The advances in Haydn scholarship that have been made in the past

forty years or so would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, who

honoured the composer rather more in word than in deed. The composer

has once more become what he became in his lifetime, a big player on the

musical stage – especially in the last ten to twenty years – and the industry

surrounding his works shows no signs of a slump. Because of the late start

suffered by Haydn in musicological terms, a sense of evangelizing zeal still

surrounds much of the scholarly and performing activity on his behalf,

informed by a confidence that the composer is ‘on the up’. However, for all

the advances made in our knowledge of Haydn, the balance of this progress

has been rather uneven. Not surprisingly, most attention has been devoted

to all the musicological problems surrounding such a vast and widely dis-

persed creative output – matters of authenticity, chronology, documenta-

tion, performance practice, and the establishment of reliable and scholarly

editions. On the other hand, in hermeneutic terms, the Haydn industry is

still young, perhaps in obedience to the old unwritten law of musical

research that demanded a full tally of ‘facts’ before proper aesthetic inter-

pretation could begin. This may be somewhat unfair, since work that

answers this need has begun to appear in more than isolation, but there is

no doubt that the general thrust of Haydn research has been highly posi-

tivistic. When some of this work has crossed the line into aesthetics, the

results have often been disappointing, strikingly below the level of thought

evident elsewhere. The result is that our perception of Haydn as a creative

figure is quite undeveloped compared with the historical and aesthetic res-

onance that has accrued to all other comparably great composers.Certainly

no major composer can have inspired less fanciful prose.

Accordingly, the chapters that make up this volume deal principally

with matters of reception, style and aesthetics. Every contribution repre-

sents a quite fresh approach to an existing area of research or opens up new

territory – in the very spirit of the composer himself.The first chapter treats

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a topic that has but rarely been touched on, and yet the image of Haydn

today still has much to do with that created for him by the nineteenth

century. Certainly compared with the extensive literature on the reception

of Mozart and Beethoven during the Romantic era,Haydn has been scantily

dealt with, this in itself proof of how tenacious the nineteenth century’s

imagery and priorities have been. It is just this imagery, as articulated by

Leon Botstein, that has dictated the lack of fanciful prose. For all the com-

paratively bullish state of the Haydn industry – the marked increase in

high-level scholarly thought about the composer and the growing exposure

of many of his works in performance and recording – there is no doubt that

the composer is a long way from being embraced by the wider musical

public at the level which is his due. For this wider musical public the image

of Haydn continues to be somewhat mundane and flat. There is another

unwritten law, one more particular to Haydn, that seems to stipulate that

one doesn’t claim too much for the composer. Haydn is too rarely under-

stood as the revolutionary he was; many ‘insiders’ know him to be an

incomparably original composer and thinker about (or in) music, but this

is far from being the public perception. This state of affairs, whose roots lie

again in the ideology of nineteenth-century musical thought, was articu-

lated not so long ago by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, when he described Haydn,

without too much licence, as the composer ‘who[m] concert promoters

have always regarded as box office death, even if true musicians have a

passion for him almost beyond any other composer’.1

Personal experience bears out the force of Wheatcroft’s remarks.

Among these ‘true musicians’, a large proportion of the Haydn devotees I

have encountered have been composers. The mere mention of the com-

poser’s name has often been enough to prompt the most enthusiastic of tes-

timonials. And yet, consistent with the previous unwritten law, this Haydn

worship has always had an underground character – something passed on

by word of mouth rather than practised in public. This testifies to some lin-

gering nineteenth-century associations. Haydn must seem too slight a

figure to place at the pinnacle of musical art; the traditional imagery would

not allow him to be profound enough in thought or comprehensive enough

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1 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Profile (Schiff’s Unfashionable Talent)’, Daily Telegraph, 7September 1988, p. 14.

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in range to occupy such a position.And so he remains something of a secret

addiction.

Those who have declared their allegiance in one form or other have

been of the most diverse creative proclivities, going well beyond those who

might be thought to share common artistic concerns. Take the seemingly

surprising example of John Williams, the maestro of film composers; for

Williams, Haydn ‘occupies pride of place’ in his ‘pantheon’ of composing

gods.2 Two composers have been enlisted here to express themselves pub-

licly on the subject. In Chapter 9 George Edwards investigates a neglected

field – Haydn’s recapitulations – and evokes the sheer technical command

and resource that fascinates so many composers in particular. Chapter 10,

by Robin Holloway,explores the significance and stature of the composer in

the broadest terms. As has already been outlined, Haydn has never played a

major role in accounts of cultural history, has never achieved the emblem-

atic status accorded to such composers as Beethoven, Debussy and

Stravinsky, although his creative agenda can be said to have been finally just

as radical. This chapter sets the seal on the attempt of this book to broaden

the base of our understanding of the composer.

Another legacy of the nineteenth century (which must be starting to

assume demonic proportions for the reader) has been the strong emphasis

on instrumental music as the core of the Viennese Classical style. The

sacred music of the Classical era has altogether received little considera-

tion, swept aside by the ‘rise’ of the sonata, symphony and other ‘abstract’

instrumental forms; the fact that religious vocal works preoccupied Haydn

extensively during the last part of his career sits uncomfortably with the

tendency to give most weight to his instrumental music. In Chapter 2 James

Webster reconsiders some of the sacred vocal music, with particular atten-

tion to rhetoric, and offers a new governing idea, that of ‘salvation’, in the

attempt to give Haydn’s work in the field a stronger aesthetic profile.

Chapter 3 continues the treatment of neglected vocal genres. Although lit-

erature on Haydn operas has increased modestly of late, what has been

largely missing thus far is any attempt to provide readings of individual

operas as artistic wholes. Jessica Waldoff undertakes this for La vera

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2 Edward Seckerson, ‘Interview (He knows the score)’, The Independent (weekendsupplement), 25 May 1996, p. 3.

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costanza. Ultimately, it can only be by focusing on particular works that any

progress can be made in putting Haydn’s operatic achievement on a firm

footing. In the attempt to achieve this by giving Haydn a part to play in the

intellectual history of the eighteenth century, the chapter shares an empha-

sis with many other essays in this volume, one that has not been apparent in

the treatment of Haydn until rather recently.

Chapter 4 also represents an attempt to ground Haydn firmly in the

intellectual history of his time, not just as a passive representative but as an

active agent in creating a new understanding of the art of music. The ‘aes-

thetic optimism’ with which Daniel Chua concludes his discussion might

be reinforced by recollecting Haydn’s celebrated letter to the music lovers of

Bergen, on the occasion of their performance of The Creation: ‘There are so

few happy and contented peoples here below; grief and sorrow are always

their lot; perhaps your labours will once be a source from which the care-

worn, or the man burdened with affairs, can derive a few moments’ rest and

refreshment’.3 Chua’s optimism, though, is rather different from that nor-

mally associated with the figure of Papa Haydn. Received critical opinion

has in fact only allowed for one time of aesthetic pessimism in the com-

poser’s career: in Chapter 5 Mark Evan Bonds argues for a reassessment of

this Sturm und Drang period, primarily on technical rather than intellec-

tual grounds. From this treatment it might almost appear that the technical

features of the Sturm und Drang were appropriated or invented precisely so

that they could function as obstacles, placed by the composer in his way so

as to force a rethinking of technical habits and thereby in effect entailing a

‘cours complet de la composition’. But this technical self-consciousness, as

Robin Holloway reminds us, is one of Haydn’s defining characteristics. In

the following chapter Michael Spitzer deals with the notion of Sturm und

Drang from a different standpoint and then argues for the continuity of the

composer’s approach between this and the ‘lighter’ galant style that fol-

lowed. James Webster then reviews the symphonies written in these years of

‘entertainment’, in which Haydn was supposedly devoting his greatest

artistic efforts to opera. If the Sturm und Drang label has given rise to many

misunderstandings, so has the notion of a lighter style associated with the

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3 H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works V: Haydn: The Late Years1801–1809 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 233.

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later 1770s and beyond. The problematic image of ‘entertainment’ encap-

sulates our difficulties in dealing with some of the basic premises of

Viennese Classicism, both in Haydn’s and others’ hands. No one can fail to

notice the accessibility of the prevalent idiom, its sociability of tone, the

amiability of much of its diction.While historically Mozart has been able to

be rescued from any sense of superficiality that might be associated with

such attributes, Haydn (as Leon Botstein explains) has not always been so

fortunate.Our still largely Romantic sense of the role and function of music

has tended to make the comic,amiable and social suspect in their own right,

unless they are ‘deepened’ in some demonstrable way. We readily assume

that profundity is to be equated with the overtly serious in tone or the

melancholy; it is harder for us to accept that what may be modest or inviting

or sociable is just as valid a tone of artistic voice as that which presents itself

more earnestly.4 Melancholia turns us inward to reflect on ourselves as

individuals; comedy involves laughter which is generally shared, remind-

ing us of our similarities with others and our position in a social commu-

nity. Rather than being perceived as intrinsically inadequate, the language

of comedy and amiability that Haydn did so much to imprint on his time

should be heard for the novelty it was, historically speaking, and for the

strength of its conviction.

The social implications of a comedic language and the immense

power it can generate were recently brought home to me in the context of an

undergraduate exam in Cambridge. As part of a first-year aural paper, the

students had to listen to the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 90 in C major,

three times in all, and write an essay on what they heard. This is one of those

movements where the composer offers the listener numerous false endings,

the confusion augmented by the fact that the real final ending is less

emphatic than an earlier false one, and the whole made infinitely more

teasing by the repeat indicated for the second half of the movement.

Anticipating the usual knowing titters from the assembled undergradu-

ates, I found that what ensued was much more striking than that. The first

few false endings, followed by fermatas, witnessed a rustling of pens on

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4 For an excellent discussion of these issues in depth see Wye J. Allanbrook,‘Mozart’s Tunes and the Comedy of Closure’, in James M. Morris, ed., OnMozart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in association with theWoodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994), pp. 169–86.

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papers, only for the listeners to find themselves conned, their musical

instincts overturned. Each subsequent false ending saw a growing reluc-

tance to begin the writing of the essay; when the movement finally did come

to a close, it was followed by a long and delicious period of inactivity and

silence. Clearly no student was going to make the first move and be embar-

rassed all over again. The atmosphere was electric with uncertainty.

Eventually through the agony the comic premise could be glimpsed once

more, as one could compare a personal response with that of one’s neigh-

bours and enjoy the shared confusion and surprise. If the students felt inad-

equate in the light of this performance, then so did I. What I thought had

been grasped from a reading of the score fell well short of the artistic reality

– an intensely imaginative dramatization of the listening experience. This

was one of the most inspiring encounters I have had with Haydn. It is to be

hoped that the arguments presented in this volume can do some justice to

the power and importance of this great artist.

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Editor’s note

The piano sonatas and trios are referred to according to the number-

ing of the Universal Edition (edited by Christa Landon) and the Doblinger

edition (edited by H.C.Robbins Landon) respectively.

As a volume entitled ‘Haydn Studies’ is already in existence (the

Proceedings of the International Haydn Conference held in Washington,

D.C., in 1975, edited by Jens Peter Larsen, Howard Serwer and James

Webster, and published by Norton in 1981), it is suggested that any refer-

ences to the current volume should take the form of ‘Cambridge Haydn

Studies’.

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1 The consequences of presumed innocence: thenineteenth-century reception of Joseph Haydn1

1 The Haydn paradox: from engaged affection to distant respectThe mystery that plagues the contemporary conception and recep-

tion of Haydn and his music has a long and remarkably unbroken history.

Perhaps Haydn experienced the misfortune (an ironic one when one con-

siders the frequency of premature deaths among his great contemporaries

or near contemporaries) of living too long.Years before his death in 1809 he

was considered so old that the French and English had already presumed

him dead in 1805.2 Many wrote condolence letters and a Requiem Mass was

planned in Paris. Haydn’s music was both familiar and venerated. Raphael

Georg Kiesewetter (1773–1850), writing in Vienna in 1846, reflected the

perspective of the beginning of the nineteenth century in his Geschichte der

europaeisch-abendlaendischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik. Haydn had ‘ele-

vated all of instrumental music to a never before anticipated level of perfec-

tion’. Haydn had a ‘perfect knowledge of instrumental effects’ and with

Mozart (for whom Haydn was the ‘example and ideal’) created a ‘new

school which may be called the German or . . . the “Viennese”school’. Theirs

was the ‘golden age’ of music. Most significantly, Haydn’s instrumental

works represented the standard of what was ‘true beauty’ in music.3

Lurking beneath Kiesewetter’s praise of Haydn (and his discreet

expressions of doubt about the novelties of Haydn’s successors, including

1

1 This essay is an expanded and revised form of my essay entitled ‘The Demise ofPhilosophical Listening’, in Elaine Sisman, ed., Haydn and his World (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 255–88. I am deeply indebted to theinvaluable criticism and assistance of Elaine Sisman and Irene Zedlacher, and tothe encouragement of Dean Sutcliffe and the writings of James Webster.

2 Karl and Irene Geiringer, Haydn: A Creative Life in Music (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1982), pp. 182–3.

3 2nd edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1846), pp. 96, 98.

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Beethoven), particularly in the notion of ‘true beauty’, was a not atypical

late eighteenth-century engagement, on the part of connoisseurs of music,

with the philosophical quest for a true, valid and therefore objective aes-

thetic experience and criterion of aesthetic apperception. The locus classi-

cus of this concern is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, first

published in 1790. Kant defined taste as the ‘faculty for judging an object in

reference to the imagination’s free conformity to law’.4 For Kant, the ‘peculiar

feature of a judgement of taste’ was ‘a subjective agreement of the imagina-

tion and understanding – without such an objective agreement as there is

when the representation is referred to a definite concept of an object’. This

notion of an ‘agreement’, or, as Paul Guyer has termed it, a ‘harmony

between imagination and understanding’, had particular relevance for the

perception and judgement of music in the eighteenth century. Kant

expressed explicit caveats about music as an art form in terms of music’s

weaknesses vis-à-vis the ‘culture’ and ‘expansion of the faculties’ that

‘concur in judgement’. Yet it is precisely instrumental music, absent from

any claims to representation, narration and description, as in many Haydn

quartets, trios, sonatas and symphonies, that provides the ideal case for the

‘agreement’ between imagination and judgement. Music becomes the

perfect vehicle for the cultivation and display of taste. In turn, taste, that

special merger of imagination and understanding, in the case of music

lends ‘rightful authority’ to the person who possesses it over mere fashion

and general opinion.

Kant argued that instrumental music can ‘communicate universally’,

in part because of the necessity of music having a mathematical form.

Music functions under rules that are essentially mathematical in their char-

acter, in view of the absence of aesthetical ideas in music that ‘are concepts

or determinate thoughts’. Music becomes an ideal example of aesthetic

formalism. The mathematical character of music itself is not the cause of

the enjoyment of music but is its ‘indispensable condition’, since it permits

the unique ‘animation of the mind’along with emotions and pleasures that

harmonize understanding and imagination.5

2

4 Trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), p. 77.5 Ibid., pp. 173–4. I am indebted to Paul Guyer’s excellent discussion of these

issues in his Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1979), pp. 79–96.

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As will become apparent later on, this elegant and clear construct of

what it meant genuinely to respond to, appreciate and judge music was not

unique to Kant. Rather, Kant’s formulation brought an elaborate and

extensive eighteenth-century philosophical tradition of speculation on

the character and impact of music to its conclusion. That tradition

ran parallel with an eighteenth-century aristocratic sensibility that

connoisseurship of music was a genuine display of distinction. With the

passing of Kiesewetter’s (and also Beethoven’s) generation during the first

three decades of the nineteenth century – a generation comprised of indi-

viduals born around 1770 who came to maturity before the end of the

century – this decidedly refined notion of musical connoisseurship and

taste, which involved a high order of rational mental functioning as well as

a powerful imagination and capacity for discernment, had become

anachronistic.

This is evident not only in the writings of philosophers but among

writers on music. Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842), who belonged to

Kiesewetter’s generation, in his 1824 book directed at the lay public, Für

Freunde der Tonkunst, took special pains to praise Haydn as the most origi-

nal and the richest composer, even when compared with Beethoven, pre-

cisely on the grounds of Haydn’s command of the formal game of altering

rhythmic patterns, accents and combinations in instrumental music.

Citing the quartets, Rochlitz underscored Haydn’s appeal precisely to the

intellect, the understanding and therefore to the joys of the imagination

triggered by the spontaneous recognition of the inventiveness and ingenu-

ity contained in the structural and formal procedures of music.6 With the

decline in the prestige of the many varying forms of philosophical listening,

the expectation that the pleasure of music involved some sort of objective

harmonizing of rational thinking and the capacity for personal subjective

musings disappeared. As a consequence, Haydn’s place in history and the

repertory changed.A genuine respect for him remained, but Rochlitz’s and

Kiesewetter’s form of affection and regard, particularly Kiesewetter’s idea

that Haydn’s instrumental works were ‘true beauty’ concretely realized,

vanished.

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6 Friedrich Rochlitz, ‘Der Componist und der Gelehrte: Ein Gespräch’, in FürFreunde der Tonkunst, IV, 3rd edn (Leipzig: Carl Cnobloch, 1868), pp. 254–6.

3


Compare, for example, Adolph Kullak’s treatise Die Aesthetik des

Klavierspiels, first published in 1860 and then, from 1876 on, reprinted in

four editions well into the twentieth century. This book was arguably the

most widely read and influential book on piano teaching and playing of the

nineteenth century – the dominant enterprises of the musical profession

and public of the age.Kullak repeats the view that came to pervade the nine-

teenth-century opinion of Haydn in the years after the death of Beethoven.

According to Kullak,Mozart, and subsequently Beethoven, followed a ‘path

opened by Haydn’. But they achieved greater perfection. By that Kullak

meant that Mozart and Beethoven realized a ‘spiritual importance’ inher-

ent in music. Haydn failed to take the next logical step from his own

remarkable innovations, which was a ‘psychological’ one. This would have

led him to strive for a profundity that his music never achieved. Haydn’s

music lacked the ‘inner seriousness’, the ‘dark and demonic’ and the ‘inter-

ior depth of mood’characteristic of Mozart and Beethoven.

Haydn’s music was therefore ‘untouched by the hardships of mature

life’. His music was childlike, natural, full of joy, naïve, happy. Haydn’s ideal

of beauty had once been innovative in that it mirrored a new sense of

freedom. It emerged out of Haydn’s rejection of past constraints, including

religious dogma, and a ‘crystallized canon of old ideas’. Yet despite its

novelty and natural ‘freshness’, Haydn failed to realize the immanent power

of his own formal innovations and remained tied to a superficial notion of

symmetry, proportion and evident harmony. The ambitions and virtues

held in high regard by Kiesewetter had been transformed into evident

limitations. Haydn’s greatness, although uncontested, lay primarily in

breaking the new ground on which Mozart and Beethoven could develop.7

As the nineteenth century progressed, despite the myriad of conflicts

and quarrels about music and its character, Kullak’s version of Haydn’s

place in music history and his conception of the virtues and shortcomings

of Haydn’s music not only became unexceptional, but it remained at once

strikingly stable and uncontroversial. Perhaps the most dramatic and

influential statement of the standard view of Haydn (from which Kullak

doubtlessly drew) was contained in Franz Brendel’s Geschichte der Musik in

4

7 See Martin Gellrich’s introduction to Kullak, Die Aesthetik des Klavierspiels(Regensburg: Con Brio, 1876; rpt 1994) and the text, p. 21; also the 4th edn, ed.Walter Niemann (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1905), pp. 21–2.

4


Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich, first published in 1852. Brendel was

nearly forty years younger than Kiesewetter and was a contemporary of

Schumann and Mendelssohn. He became the editor in 1845 of Schumann’s

influential Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Brendel (a decade older than Kullak)

began with the premise that Haydn was ‘Mozart’s predecessor’. Haydn

opened up the ‘modern age’ and his work was ‘the soil’ from which Mozart

came. Haydn was an example of how historical necessity worked through

an individual. He emancipated musical art from tradition and authority.

Instrumental music, which Haydn developed, marked the first incarnation

of the freedom of the spirit through music in modernity.

Haydn, however, was a man of order and convention whose interior

genius was limited by his exterior self-presentation and modesty. The outer

forms of his being remained decisive in his creative work. Therefore his

forms were left without ‘being filled with a corresponding content’. His

world view, when compared with that of Mozart and Beethoven, was the

least developed and least diverse. His capacity to imagine love – the crucial

source of musical inspiration – and the feminine was inferior to that of

Mozart and Beethoven.Haydn’s essential practicality limited his expressive

capacity. He revealed a ‘teasing retreat’ from conflict in life. He was there-

fore the master of the joke and adept at conveying moods. Mozart com-

manded irony, and Beethoven, owing to the immense pain of his life, was

the composer of profound humour.

If Beethoven could be compared to Schiller and Jean Paul and Mozart

to Goethe, Haydn was closest to Wieland. Haydn mirrored purity, nature,

innocence,childhood.In the end,he was capable of engaging love only as an

abstract cosmic and universal idea, as the force uniting the opposing ele-

ments that create chaos. Mozart individualized love and rendered it a sub-

jective experience. Unlike Beethoven, Haydn did not penetrate any of the

contradictions of the world, least of all in love; contradictions are, at most,

merely alluded to on the surface of his works.8

Little within this picture has changed since Brendel’s time. In con-

temporary concert life, we notice many versions of annual ‘Mostly Mozart’

festivals and weekend-long ‘Beethoven Experiences’. Two popular

Hollywood films have been made on the lives of Mozart and Beethoven.

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5

8 Brendel, Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich, 2nd edn(Leipzig: Matthes, 1855), I, pp. 300–5, and II, pp. 28–51.

5


There is no ‘Mostly Haydn’series being planned and no film under contract.

Of the massive output of music Haydn left behind, only a small fraction

appears regularly on modern concert programmes. When a Haydn work is

programmed, it is rarely as the main event.

The Haydn ‘problem’ bequeathed by the last century to our own was

perhaps best expressed during the first decade of the twentieth century in

two anecdotes recounted by the legendary conductor Felix Weingartner.He

described his encounter with Joseph Joachim when, in 1907, as part of the

preparation for the upcoming centennial Haydn activities, they were both

invited to sit on the advisory committee of the Breitkopf & Härtel complete

Haydn edition.Weingartner had had little prior contact with Joachim, who

was suspicious of Weingartner’s Wagnerian and Lisztian sympathies. None

the less,at the meetings Joachim (then a man of over seventy,who would die

later that year) more than once took Weingartner’s hand and asked, ‘Truly,

was not Haydn indeed a great man?’

That Joachim’s affectionate question might well have been apt in the

climate of a century ago can be gleaned from Weingartner’s second anec-

dote. When the centennial Haydn celebrations took place in Vienna in

1909, he, as Mahler’s successor at the Imperial Opera, was asked to pro-

gramme something that could be part of the Haydn anniversary.

Weingartner expressed his dismay that the Festival Committee failed to

grasp the brilliance of his idea that a new production of Mozart’s Magic

Flute would be the ideal tribute. Not accepting the fact that Haydn was

‘everything but a dramatic composer’, they insisted on a Haydn opera.

Weingartner’s approach mirrored the nineteenth-century notion that

Haydn’s imposing significance and achievement were most evident in his

role as the indispensable intermediary step to Mozart and Beethoven.9

2 The nineteenth-century consensusThe history of the critical and cultural reception of music remains

inextricably bound to shifting conceptions within history of what, in the

final analysis,constitutes the work of music. Indeed,continuities and major

6

9 Felix Weingartner, Lebenserinnerungen (Zürich: Orel Füssli, 1929), II, pp. 70and 202.

6


shifts in reigning attitudes about music alter the course of compositional

ambitions; they also force a reconstruction of the narrative of music

history.10

The starting-point for Haydn as a composer was the eighteenth-

century strategy best articulated by Kant that might properly be termed

‘philosophical listening’. However, the later part of the century, during

Haydn’s most celebrated and productive periods, witnessed the articula-

tion of the early Romantic emphasis on music as an aesthetic experience in

real time tied to the imagination and the nearly inarticulate inner self – a

concept best described in the late eighteenth-century writings of such early

Romantics as Jean Paul and Wackenroder. After Haydn’s death, by the mid-

nineteenth century – the era of Brendel and Kullak – a move beyond the

early Romantic notions was well under way.Although ‘music as experience’

retained its prestige with particular composers and sectors of the public,

later in the century the emphasis shifted to an allegiance to music as text, to

the printed score, which became analogous to a book that might be

sampled, read, studied and returned to at will. The character of this

approach to music demanded of the listener and amateur a novel but com-

manding self-conscious awareness of history, tradition and precedent. An

attitude towards music as a mirror of the historical moment, representative

of the generation of Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms, was not

uppermost in the early Romantic enthusiasm for music.

Despite such shifts in fundamental expectations and norms of recep-

tion over the nineteenth century, the critical response to Haydn’s music –

whether understood as a performed event or as a text to be studied and re-

read – did not change. The significant disputes during the nineteenth

century involving musical taste and culture altered the view of Bach,

Mozart and Beethoven, but not the understanding of Haydn. In the case of

no other major composer was there so little evolution,so much consistency,

so little genuine shift in aesthetic judgement and response.

-

7

10 See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Die Theorie der Rezeption: Rückschau aufihre unerkannte Vorgeschichte (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1987);and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992), for the most recent and frequently cited introductionto the historical and philosophical issues.

7


Consider, for example, the contrast between the changes in the recep-

tion of Mozart’s music and the stasis in attitudes towards Haydn. In the

1881 revision of his classic 1854 tract on music’s inherent autonomy,On the

Beautiful in Music, Eduard Hanslick used the change in Mozart reception,

and thus in the representation of Viennese Classicism itself, as a way of

strengthening the anti-Wagnerian argument that emotion could not serve

as the essential content of music. Whereas a few generations earlier

Mozart’s symphonies had been seen as vehicles of ‘vehement passion, bitter

struggle and piercing agony’ that contrasted with the ‘tranquillity and

wholesomeness of Haydn’, the two composers had now become amalga-

mated as part of an ‘Olympian Classicism’.11 Mozart, once favoured by the

early nineteenth-century Romantics, had become more like Haydn. By the

end of the nineteenth century, this distanced image of Mozart was aban-

doned again, as witnessed by the Mozart revival of the fin de siècle.12 But

Haydn stayed in the same place.

Throughout the nineteenth century, no one sensed a need to chal-

lenge the predominant view of Haydn’s music. The perception of Haydn as

innocent, naïve, cheerful, healthy, supremely well-crafted but essentially

entertaining and emotionally distant, if not irrelevant, displayed a tena-

8

11 Vom Musikalisch-Schoenen: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Dietmar Strauss(Mainz: Schott, 1990), pp. 31–3. The fact that Mozart’s music permitted avariety of subjective responses that varied over time was evidence, accordingto Hanslick, that music was objective: that there was no inherent emotionalmeaning to the work of music itself. Implicit in this argument was Hanslick’scriticism of modern Wagnerian emotionalists, who, as they relentlessly pursuedcontemporary musical fashion, either lost or never possessed the capacity tograsp the visceral intensity that Mozart might properly inspire. Hanslick mayhave been aware that during the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in France,Mozart’s symphonic music was considered inferior to Haydn’s and certainlysubordinate in importance to Mozart’s operas. Despite this Parisian preferencefor Haydn, Berlioz had little use for him, and could barely sit through aperformance of one of his symphonies. See Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism inNineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris 1834–1880(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 84–93.

12 See Gernot Gruber, Mozart and Posterity, trans. R. S. Furness (Boston:Northeastern University Press, 1994); also Heinrich Schenker, ‘Ein Wort zurMozartrenaissance’ (reprinted from the Neue Revue, 1897), in Heinrich Schenkerals Essayist und Kritiker, ed. Hellmut Federhofer (Hildesheim: Olms, 1990),pp. 252–6.

8


cious constancy after its first appearance in the age of early Romanticism.E.

T. A. Hoffmann had set the stage with his claim that ‘Haydn’s compositions

are dominated by a feeling of childlike optimism . . . a world of love, of bliss,

of eternal youth . . . no suffering, no pain; only sweet, melancholy longing

for the beloved vision’. In this sense Haydn becomes the basis upon which

‘Mozart leads us deep into the realm of spirits’. And, of course, Beethoven

‘sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain and awakens

the infinite yearning which is the essence of Romanticism’.13 This inter-

pretation was reinforced by Carpani’s epistolary Haydn biography of

1812,14 and from the evident restraint and caveats in Stendhal’s version of

Carpani a decade later.15 These two writers compared Haydn to a master

genre or landscape painter – to Claude Lorrain, the great seventeenth-

century painter – whose canvases, despite their virtues, did not provide the

beholder with an evident subjective viewpoint or the self-conscious oppor-

tunity to invent a passionate, interior response. By 1812 Haydn already

seemed distanced and historical to a new generation. The isolated individ-

ual placed within the landscape and the outer world, the figure to be found

or implied in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, was absent from a

conception of landscape painting associated with Haydn.While Beethoven

would be routinely linked with Friedrich, Haydn would be compared

instead with Tintoretto (as he was by Schumann)16 or (stylistically) with

David; he would not be compared with Delacroix. One explanation for this

was offered by Adolf Bernhard Marx, who pointed to Haydn’s relative

monothematicism, as opposed to the greater dialectical tension of

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9

13 Cited from the essays on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’sinstrumental music, in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton,trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 97–8and 237–8.

14 Le Haydine, ovvero lettere su la via e le opere del celebre maestro Giuseppe Haydn(Milan: C. Buccinelli, 1812).

15 See the excellent introduction and edition by Richard N. Coe of Stendhal, Livesof Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972). For a goodbut brief context for Stendhal see Robert Alter and Carol Cosman, A Lion forLove: A Critical Biography of Stendhal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1986).

16 Robert Schumann, Tagebücher, ed. Georg Eisman, I, 1827–1838 (Leipzig: VEBDeutscher Verlag für Musik, 1971), p. 281, took this comparison from Carpani,in Stendhal, Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, p. 141.

9


contrasting themes in the sonata forms of Mozart and Beethoven later

favoured by Romanticism.17

Critical comparisons of Haydn to a distant but honoured precursor

such as Lorrain or Tintoretto allowed nineteenth-century composers and

commentators to lavish praise on Haydn’s technical command and his role

in the development of instrumental music, particularly the sonata, quartet

and symphony. Yet Haydn was condemned to a form of aesthetic and cul-

tural irrelevance. Where the Bach revival led to a revaluation of Bach as a

figure at once historical and contemporary, Haydn served throughout the

nineteenth century as a merely historical one. He was the acknowledged

master, the father of autonomous instrumental musical discourse.

Meanwhile, his music was said to be bereft of profound emotional inspira-

tion or narrative significance.

The search for meaning in Haydn did not get very far beyond formal-

ism. Schopenhauer may have been inspired by Haydn’s music to discover

the possibilities of self-referential meaning, autonomy and significance in

music, but he overlooked Haydn’s overt attempts to convey extra-musical

meaning. Johann Friedrich Herbart rejected altogether the significance of

the text in The Creation and The Seasons, declaring, ‘fortunately, [Haydn’s]

music needs no text; it is mere curiosity that impels us to know what he has

tried to illustrate. His music is simply music, and it needs no meaning to

make it beautiful.’ An admirable but bloodless notion of formal perfection

was conceded,but that was all.18

Haydn conceivably could have provided a rallying point for mid-

century proponents of so-called absolute music, the ideal of purely musical

meaning. Indeed, to them Haydn’s consummate craftsmanship was prefer-

able to fashion and philistinism. In comments made in 1839, Schumann

hailed ‘Altvater’Haydn as welcome relief from ‘this chronically diseased era

of music’, in which one only rarely could be ‘inwardly satisfied’. Haydn,

whose music offered satisfaction because of its conservative integrity, pro-

vided relief from a painful awareness of inadequacy by being ‘clear as sun-

10

17 Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, 5th edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf& Härtel, 1879), III, pp. 595–6. Thanks to Scott Burnham for the reference.

18 Cited in Peter le Huray and James Day, eds., Music and Aesthetics in theEighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981), p. 454.

10


light . . . bereft of any sense of ennui with life, and inspiring nothing except

for joy, love of life, and a childlike happiness about everything’. Still,

Haydn’s virtues did not connect to the sensibilities that led Schumann to

embrace Thomas Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh’ as an inspiration for his Das

Paradies und die Peri.19 In 1841 Schumann displayed his more usual weari-

ness with the old master, complaining that ‘Haydn’s music has always been

played here often and one can no longer experience anything new with him.

He is like an intimate friend of the family [Hausfreund] whom one meets

always with respect and gladly. But a deeper relevance for today’s world he

does not possess.’20

Schumann’s heirs – Hanslick and other anti-Wagnerians – struck the

same note. Writing in November 1856, just two years after the completion

of his magnum opus,Hanslick noted in a review of quartet concerts:

One began as usual with Haydn, the father of the quartet, a praiseworthy

custom, so long as one does not neglect the sons in relation to the father.

The representation of the old master with two works in a cycle of six

evenings is entirely sufficient. In the first place, on account of nearly one

hundred years of unrivalled attention, Haydn’s quartets are so deeply

rooted in our blood, not only on the part of amateurs but Haydn’s

successors as composers, that we feel, in the case of every one of these

clear and cheerful musical works, that we are encountering an old friend.

Furthermore, it was part of the historical character of the Haydn era that

his quartets represented much more the common elements of a genre than

a differentiated, sharply defined individuality. It is revealing that one always

refers to ‘a Haydn quartet’ whereas one is precise with regard to the specific

work one is talking about in the case of Beethoven. It is important for the

hearer of Beethoven which of the series of Beethoven quartets he wishes to

hear, because they are all distinctly individual, which is not the case with

Haydn. The reasons do not lie exclusively with the fundamentally different

personalities of the two masters. The manner of composition was entirely

different in their respective times. Anyone who wrote more than one

hundred symphonies and came close to that in terms of quartets, could not

possibly invest in each of these works a distinct richness of individuality.

-

11

19 Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Martin Kreisig (Leipzig: Breitkopf& Härtel, 1914), I, p. 450. It is possible that Schumann, like others, sought todownplay Haydn as a model, particularly for this work, which can be heard asderiving from Haydn’s achievements in the late oratorios. 20 Ibid., II, p. 54.

11


Insofar as Beethoven wrote ten times less, he was able to put into a work ten

times more.21

Familiarity, the saying goes, breeds contempt. Hanslick’s views never

changed. In 1891 he commented with some irony on Haydn’s choral madri-

gal ‘The Storm’ that, since the world had experienced a wholly new set of

storms in the hundred years since the work’s composition, Haydn’s repre-

sentation of calm was more boring than comforting. In 1896 Hanslick

seemed more intrigued by the revival of Gassmann than in hearing Haydn

again.

The ‘opposition’ during the nineteenth century, the so-called New

German School and the Wagnerians who dominated the end of the century,

paid Haydn slightly different, but hardly more appreciative, compliments.

Franz Liszt seems to have given no attention to Haydn at all, except for a

passing interest in The Creation and by using a Haydn sonata to demon-

strate how he could make a modern piano sound like a spinet.22 In 1850

Hans von Bülow, during his early Wagnerian phase, spoke again of Haydn’s

‘childlike immediacy’. In 1856 Bülow followed Schumann’s use of Haydn,

defending him against the fake connoisseurship of the general public,

which, seeing music as an aspect of affirmative cheerfulness, liked hearing

Haydn too much and for the wrong reasons. In an essay on Wagner’s Faust

Overture in 1858, Bülow spelled out the right reasons for praising Haydn:

his ‘populist simplicity’ and ‘richness of motifs of high nobility’.Years later,

in correspondence from the 1880s about concert programming, Bülow

reiterated the familiar view of Haydn as rulemaker and precursor. His

choice of a Haydn symphony on a programme that also featured the

‘Jupiter’ Symphony and the ‘Eroica’ was contingent on how it related to the

Mozart and prepared the audience for the Beethoven.23

12

21 Sämtliche Schriften: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Dietmar Strauss, I/3,Aufsätze und Rezensionen 1855–1856 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), pp. 306–7.

22 Haydn is totally absent from August Goellerich’s diary of Liszt’s piano masterclasses. See the English-language edition of Wilhelm Jerger’s text in RichardLouis Zimdars, The Piano Master Classes of Franz Liszt 1884–1886(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); and Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, III,The Final Years 1861–1886 (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 287.

23 Briefe, VII, 1886–1894, ed. Marie von Bülow (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1908),pp. 126, 129 and 420–1; and Ausgewählte Schriften 1850–1892 (Leipzig: Breitkopf& Härtel, 1911), p. 208.

12


For Richard Wagner,Haydn was the composer who stressed the dance

and the populist roots of art music, another commonplace and oft-

repeated idea (which competed with the notion of the childlike) in nine-

teenth-century historical narratives. Beethoven was the logical historical

outgrowth, the composer who ‘opened up the boundless faculties of instru-

mental music for expressing elemental storm and stress’;24 on the other

hand, Haydn’s craftsmanship lay in hiding ‘contrapuntal ingenuity’ in the

‘rhythmic dance melody’, so that ‘the character of the dance peculiar to a

dance ordained by the laws of freest Phantasy . . . the actual breath of Joyous

human life’ was illuminated. None the less, Beethoven was to Haydn ‘as the

born adult to the man in second childhood’. In Haydn’s instrumental

music, the demonic essence of music is ‘playing with its fetters, with the

childishness of a greybeard born’.25

For all the ink that has been spilled on the aesthetic controversies of

the mid-nineteenth century regarding programme music and ‘absolute’

music,both camps viewed Haydn in much the same way.This commonality

offers an opportunity to challenge the idea that the overt split in nine-

teenth-century aesthetic approaches was as stark as their proponents and

subsequent defenders wanted posterity to think. Underlying the divide

were shared notions of what constituted music of significance for the con-

temporary listener.

One might have thought that the respect Herbart and Hanslick paid

to the purity of Haydn’s music would have inspired a certain allegiance to

Haydn’s oeuvre on the part of the most committed anti-Wagnerians. Yet

all that Clara Schumann and Joachim (in his youth) could seem to hear in

Haydn was a foreshadowing of Beethoven, particularly in Haydn’s

Adagios, or an exotic cheerful folksiness in his closing rondos.26 Clara

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13

24 ‘The Art Work of the Future’, in Prose Works, ed. William Ashton Ellis (NewYork: Broude, 1892/1966), I, pp. 120–1. For reasons of historical consistencyI am using the standard Wagner translation.

25 ‘Beethoven’, in Prose Works, V, p. 82.26 Joseph Joachim, Briefe, I, 1842–1857 (Berlin: Julius Bard, 1911), pp. 288, 295,

308; III, 1869–1907, p. 342. Also Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim,Briefwechsel, I (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908; Tutzing: HansSchneider, 1974), p. 221; Clara Schumann–Johannes Brahms. Briefe aus denJahren 1853–1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927),I, pp. 118–19.

13


Schumann’s concert repertory contained only two sonatas for violin and

piano and nothing more.27 Brahms presents a more complex case. In his

extensive library, amidst the manuscript and first-edition treasures, there

is very little Haydn to be found, in contrast to the extensive collection of

works by Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. He did copy out a few works by

Haydn, and he also varied the St Antoni Chorale, which he believed to be

by Haydn. The Serenade, Op. 11, opens with a striking resemblance to

Haydn’s London Symphony, No. 104, and it has been argued that Haydn

was crucial to Brahms’s compositional struggle in the 1850s as he searched

for models and sources that might differentiate himself from

Schumann.28 None the less, for both pro- and anti-Wagnerians, the

underlying expectation remained the same: music was supposed to be

capable of inspiring and commanding the interior of one’s soul, and

Haydn’s music failed to do so, whereas Bach’s and Mozart’s, not to speak of

Beethoven’s, did.

One slight reason may have been the extent to which Haydn’s music

was a crucial component of serious musical education, given that what we

learn in school often emerges tainted by the brush of official approval.

Familiarity with Haydn was an indispensable part of nineteenth-century

self-cultivation (Bildung), and his work retained a visible place in concert

life throughout the century.The Seasons and The Creation remained staples

of the amateur choral tradition in German-speaking Europe.29 A limited

but none the less varied array of Haydn’s symphonies – twenty-one, to be

precise – was part of the Vienna Philharmonic repertory between 1860 and

1910.30 A somewhat more generous selection, including excerpts from

14

27 Claudia de Vries, Die Pianistin Clara Wieck-Schumann (Mainz: Schott, 1996),p. 366.

28 Brahms made a copy of the slow movement of an early Haydn symphony, No.16 in B flat major (1762), in about 1870 and copied it out for Joachim a yearlater. He also copied out a vocal pastorella attributed to Haydn, possibly in 1863,and chose the St Antoni Chorale as the theme of his orchestral variations, Op.56b. See Margit L. McCorkle, Johannes Brahms: Thematisch-BibliographischesWerkverzeichnis (Munich: Henle, 1984), Anhang VI Nr. 4, Nos. 63, 67, 68, p. 723.

29 See, for example, notices of performances throughout German-speaking Europein the Viennese Neue Musikalische Presse from the mid-1890s on, and in theNeue Musik-Zeitung published in Stuttgart and Leipzig from the same period.

30 See Richard von Perger, Fünfzig Jahre Wiener Philharmoniker (Vienna: CarlFrome, 1910).

14


operas and choral works, marked the Leipzig Gewandhaus repertory

during the same period. But even in Leipzig, Haydn stood behind

Beethoven and Mozart. Owing in part to the influence of English taste,

Haydn retained a stable place in the repertory of American symphony

orchestras until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when per-

formances of his music experienced some decline.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘to the extent that the temperament of

genius [Genialität] can coexist with a thoroughly good man, Haydn pos-

sessed it. He goes to the very edge of the line which morality prescribes for

the intellect; he just makes music that has “no past”.’31 Nietzsche, in his

post-Wagnerian phase, put the collective nineteenth-century view in its

most profound form. Haydn’s achievement was as the figure in history who

was universally credited with developing Classical forms and instrumental

music, the artist whose normative achievement retrospectively tran-

scended the historical. His music sounded as if it had no precursors and, in

the sense of Nietzsche, successfully defied the nasty nineteenth-century

habit of historicization.

At the same time, a residual sense of blandness and excessive respect-

ability remained; insofar as conventional middle-class morality could ever

be associated with the aesthetic realm, Haydn managed it. Nietzsche’s

formulation was his own gloss on the widely accepted link between inno-

cence–childhood–purity and Haydn.His use of the word ‘Genialität’ is con-

scious, as is his use of ‘Moralität’. As Nietzsche knew, both words overtly

suggest parallel English terms, which carry different meanings explicitly

relevant to Haydn’s London years. The German use of geniality suggests

both greatness and creativity, as well as the English meaning of an unobjec-

tionable cheerfulness. Haydn as a ‘personality’ in the nineteenth-century

sense was nowhere to be found: he had transcended the mundane and the

purely human by writing himself out of his own music. He invented music

as a formal, abstract enterprise without, however, developing its capacity to

be profound and therefore transcend conventional morality.

Neither Wagnerians nor anti-Wagnerians seemed to need to delve

beyond this position.Hearing Haydn as the composer without a past meant

-

15

31 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Zweiter Band, in Werke, III, ed. Karl Schlechta(Munich: Hanser, 1954), pp. 934–5.

15


there was no historical persona to approach, and no need to ‘undo’ the way

in which his music had been heard from the beginning of the century on, as

had been the case with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In the mid-1880s,

when Nietzsche penned his aphorism, Haydn had ‘no past’, in part because

the reception of his music had never evolved.

Perhaps Haydn’s most crucial formal contribution was that he had

realized, as the historian Emil Naumann put it, ‘the great natural law of

organic development’ in musical language and form in ways independent

of non-musical narrative patterns. His music seemed as normative as it was

unobjectionable; it was cheerful, wholesome, eminently healthy.32 It pre-

pared the way for other composers who would engage and capture the

imagination. Ludwig Nohl, writing in 1866, allowed that Haydn, as the

developer of the sonata, had set the stage for Mozart and Beethoven to

invest the form with ‘truly ennobled and grandiose pictures of humanity

and life’, thereby lifting it out of the realm of ‘mere wordless play of sounds’.

Nohl used practically the same language as Nietzsche would later use in

describing Haydn’s inspiration as ‘genial’ and his work as a ‘source of plea-

sure and edification’.33 In an era beset by controversy, hostility and a nearly

obsessive reflection on originality, historical precedent and the nature and

character of music, such ritual praise was damning indeed. Bach, Handel,

Mozart and Beethoven were reheard, rethought, and actively fought over –

but not Haydn.

This late nineteenth-century consensus regarding Haydn seemed so

all-pervasive that it motivated Hermann Kretzschmar to weigh in with a

long dissenting view, stressing the composer’s profundity and emotional

depth. In the introduction to his discussion of the Haydn symphonies in his

classic guide to the concert repertory, Führer durch den Konzertsaal, he

wrote: ‘An astonishingly large number of music lovers and musicians,

including names possessed of the most celebrated reputations, believe that

they can honor “Papa”Haydn with a mixture of condescension by consider-

ing him “genial” and “childlike”’. To understand Haydn, Kretzschmar

believed, one had to concentrate on how he transformed the mundane and

rendered his material majestic and mythic. In Kretzschmar’s view, Haydn

16

32 Deutsche Tondichter von Sebastian Bach bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin:Oppenheim, 1882), p. 147.

33 Musikalisches Skizzenbuch (Munich: Merhoff, 1866), pp. 150–1.

16


should be compared to Aeschylus and Sophocles.34 Like the great Greek

tragedians,he transformed the simple into the profound.

Kretzschmar’s association of Haydn with Aeschylus and Sophocles

was a rare perception. Though nineteenth-century music critics were

obsessed with the relationship between formal procedures and narration

and representation, the ‘master’of form,Haydn,was excluded from the dis-

cussion. Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert were seen as using Haydn’s

strategies, and in the process achieving a narrative-through-music that

appeared compelling. Meanwhile, the narrative in Haydn’s music – either

subjective (in the listener) or objective (in the music itself) – had no

import. This view persisted despite the acceptance of programmatic titles

for many symphonies.

Advocates of programme music in the nineteenth century cited

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony as a model and recognized an emotional

content in Mozart. Yet Haydn’s efforts at tone-painting and the profound

philosophical content of many of his instrumental works produced no res-

onance. Richard Strauss had only a marginal interest in Haydn, though

Mozart always rivalled Wagner as a source of inspiration for him.And even

a Haydn defender such as Leopold Schmidt, the Berlin critic and enthusias-

tic Straussian, unconsciously ended up reinforcing the picture of Haydn’s

music as somehow sterile and distant. In his highly successful popular 1898

Haydn biography, Schmidt argued that Haydn should properly be seen

more as a ‘youthful revolutionary’ than as ‘an old man in a wig’. By this he

meant that the example of Haydn’s command of musical form might well

have a larger influence on future generations than it seemed to exert on con-

temporary composers. Picking up on a similar theme struck fifty years

earlier by Schumann, Schmidt lamented the contemporary circumstance

in which music is ‘freed from old traditions’, yet strives in confused ways to

‘unclear objectives’. As he put it, ‘the pressure for originality, which is not

based on historical evolution or transcendent creative talent, too quickly

takes on the symptoms of the sickly. It is therefore desirable that so pure and

fundamentally healthy an artistic spirit as Haydn’s should function for a

long time as a productive inspiration.’For Schmidt,Haydn understood that

the point of all music was the spreading of joy: ‘The naturalness of his

-

17

34 Vol. I (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1919), p. 113.

17


musical inspiration and realization should remain a model for us’.35 Once

again Haydn was held up as the antidote to philistinism and excess (of the

kind audible in Mahler). Schmidt’s language linking Haydn to medicinal

and moral purity is totally unlike the prose applied traditionally to

Beethoven or Mozart. As with Nietzsche and Wagner, Schmidt’s emphasis

on health reveals the weakness of Haydn’s position in the fin de siècle.

The many handbooks written for the musical public during the nine-

teenth century further confirm this impression. In the New Musical Lexicon

of Music of 1857 Adolf Bernhard Marx and the editors once again stressed

the affirmative qualities of Haydn. Though Marx also talked about Haydn’s

‘natural inwardness and profundity’, he explicitly delimited, as did

Hoffmann, Haydn’s attribution of emotional and intellectual meaning,

pointing out that even when Haydn deals with the sorrowful and the grim,

he does so as a ‘loving father’, for whom balance and moderation are never

lost.36 Two lexica from the 1880s, one by August Reissman, the multi-

volumed Mendel Lexicon, and the supplemental Lexicon to the Cologne

Neue Musikzeitung, repeat these ideas, adding only that Haydn’s historical

role was primary as the father of instrumental music and the ‘true creator of

the sonata form’.37 As Reissman put it, Haydn did not so much invent any

new forms as bring ‘order’,by creating ‘regulated organization’that resulted

in the mature forms of instrumental music.

The situation in America was much the same. In his 1874 lectures

entitled History of Music Frederic Louis Ritter, the influential Belgian-born

American composer and conductor, began his treatment of Haydn by

acknowledging the original eighteenth-century view that in Haydn, instru-

ments ‘sing like the inspired organs of an ideal sphere’. But he quickly

18

35 Joseph Haydn (Berlin: ‘Harmonie’ Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst,1898), p. 116. Schmidt’s biography appeared in Heinrich Reimann’s popularseries Berühmte Musiker: Lebens- und Charakterbilder nebst Einführung in dieWerke der Meister.

36 See Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre Pflege: Methode der Musik(Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1873), p. 178.

37 The lexica are August Reissman and Hermann Mendel, eds., MusikalischesConversations-Lexicon (Berlin: Oppenheim, 1880); Eduard Bernsdorf, ed.,Neues Universal Lexicon der Tonkunst (Dresden: Schaefer, 1857); P. J. Tonger,Conversations-Lexicon der Tonkunst, Beilage der Neuen Musikzeitung (Cologne:Hassel, n. d.).

18


descended into the nineteenth-century pattern.Haydn is credited with cre-

ating the modern symphony and string quartet, but the dominant impres-

sion his music makes is of a ‘whole emotional world’ of ‘childlike naïveté,

unrestrained joy, good-natured humor’. Haydn was capable of ‘a healthy

humor . . . touching pathos and unreserved joy, all the more tender and

naïve feelings’but his music was ‘seldom darkened by deep passion’.38

The impediment that nineteenth-century attitudes posed for an

ambitious re-evaluation of Haydn was not entirely lost on the scholars who

gathered in Vienna in 1909 to celebrate the Haydn centenary. The stultify-

ing insistence on the formal and foundational merits of his work to the

exclusion of any larger meaning or significance, however, was countered in

a disappointing manner. Feverish nationalisms and political rivalries were

raging on the Continent in the years just before World War I. One might

have wished for a serious reinterpretation that would have asserted a new

relevance for Haydn in such a context. Instead, the 1909 conclave made a

virtue out of the seeming absence of controversy regarding Haydn’s music

and its historical position. Alexander Mackenzie exclaimed that he was

proud to honour the memory of Haydn as the father of all ‘cosmopolitan

musicians. . . . The childlike simplicity of Haydn’s music still delights us all’,

he noted,as he called for a ‘closer union and more perfect harmony between

musicians of all countries’.39 Guido Adler’s opening speech to the congress

celebrated Haydn’s connection with populism, his roots in folk music and

his unique place in connecting Viennese Classicism to the immanent and

essential universalism of music.

As the twentieth century progressed, nineteenth-century notions of

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19

38 History of Music: In the Form of Lectures, 2nd series (Boston: Oliver Ditson,1874), pp. 172 and 181.

39 See Guido Adler, ed., Haydn-Zentenarfeier. Bericht III. Kongress derInternationalen Musikgesellschaft Wien 25–29 Mai (Vienna: Artaria, 1909), pp.41, 45, 52–3. This view is strikingly reminiscent of Joachim’s letter to his nephewHarold in 1898, in which he remarked, in response to Henry Hadow’s view ofHaydn, that he ‘lifts the material into a higher sphere and has the German giftto assimilate so that it becomes a universal, ideal thought, intelligible to allnations’. To Joachim’s credit, he argued that the slow movements of Haydn wereequal in their depth and religiosity to those of Bach and Beethoven, but inmaking this claim he knew that his view was distinctly a minority one. Joachim,Briefe, III, pp. 481–2.

19


Haydn continued to be influential, despite the post-World War I context of

neoclassicism.40 How can one interpret, for example, the fact that in Arnold

Schoenberg’s 1911 Theory of Harmony there is barely a mention of Haydn

and, in contrast to Mozart, not a single Haydn musical example is used?41

An intense new musicological interest, sparked by the first modern com-

plete edition of Haydn’s works,42 sought to untangle a dense growth of

authenticity problems and at the same time dust off works by Haydn not

performed since the eighteenth century. Writing in 1951, John H. Mueller

noted that this effort at a revival in the early twentieth century could be

explained in part because Haydn’s symphonies spoke ‘directly to the twen-

tieth-century era’, because they ‘are possessed of the utmost lucidity and

elegance . . . and an integrity absolutely unmarred by any affectation,

exaggeration, or bombast’ and offer ‘scintillating relief from the congested

orchestration of the late Romantics’.43 In fact, Mueller was only partially

correct: the twentieth century has seen not one Haydn revival, but at least

three. The first, early in the twentieth century, occurred precisely in reac-

tion against late Romanticism, but was overshadowed by an even greater

resurgence of interest in Mozart. The second, after the Second World War,

was sparked by another attempt at a new edition and the first modern per-

formances of many works, often organized by H. C. Robbins Landon. And

during the third, in the twenty-odd years since the Haydn festival-confer-

ence in Washington in 1975 (followed by the Haydn Year 1982, his 250th

birthday), the musicological era met the early performance era in ways that

sought to reclaim Haydn as a composer of passion and intensity to match

Haydn the composer of elegance and refinement. But there is a long way to

go: Haydn still fails to speak as directly to us as he might, because Mozart

20

40 Scott Messing, Neo-Classicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept throughthe Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 62.

41 Schoenberg’s pedagogical writings later in his career give somewhat more spaceto Haydn, but Mozart and Beethoven overwhelm Haydn as representatives ofClassical procedures in composition. See Fundamentals of Musical Composition,ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1970).

42 This edition, by Mandyczewski and others (Leipzig), was begun belatedly in1907 (compared to the series of Gesamtausgaben of Bach, Mozart, Beethovenand others begun decades earlier, in some cases already in the 1850s) and brokeoff in the 1930s after the publication of only a small portion of Haydn’s works.

43 The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951), p. 212.

20


and Beethoven continue to dominate our conception of him. The notion of

Haydn as precursor lingers.

Why, then, did the nineteenth century consistently define Haydn’s

compositional mastery in terms of simplicity, humour, cheerfulness,

geniality, folksiness, order, all implying an absence of passion and a lack of

emotional,narrative and psychic relevance?

3 Four aspects of paradoxical innocence:Haydn’s deification into irrelevanceThe explanation for the respectful but bland deification of Haydn in

the nineteenth century – as a composer of more crucial historical

significance than continuing aesthetic and cultural valence – possesses four

dimensions of increasing complexity. First is what might be called the

‘touchstone’ approach: the use of Haydn as a stable and neutral measure of

cultural criticism. Second are the rituals of nineteenth-century biography

that made Haydn both an unfortunate victim of the ancien régime and a

populist figure, and therefore easier to set to the side. Third is the larger

subject of nineteenth-century attitudes toward the aesthetics of the eight-

eenth century, which reveals the diminishment of one of its great achieve-

ments and pleasures, that which might be called philosophical listening.

Finally comes the transformation of late eighteenth-century views on

music-making and musical communication, in which we see a new ideol-

ogy of connoisseurship that reflected the need to create a normative and

hierarchical Classicism in response to the enormous increase in the size of

music’s audience. These dimensions of Haydn reception will be taken up in

turn.

Haydn as touchstoneHaydn served as a constant instrument of cultural self-criticism for

nineteenth-century figures from Schumann to Schmidt. Unlike Bach,

Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, however, Haydn was not appropriated as a

source of inspiration and emulation. Precisely because he was not an object

of contemporaneity, he and his music could function as a clear-cut con-

trast.As we have seen,Haydn was effectively and reflexively used as a symbol

of cultural criticism because, as Hanslick pointed out, he was considered a

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21

21


neutral and nearly unobjectionable part of standard musical education.

One passed through Haydn on the way to musical maturity just the way

music history passed through Haydn on the way to Mozart and Beethoven.

Taking the wrong turn – a descent into philistinism – meant failing to learn

the lessons of history.

The comparative neutrality of Haydn within the nineteenth-century

construct of the Classical canon, his availability as a symbol of cultural crit-

icism and contrast, is perhaps best highlighted by one of the recurring

peculiarities of nineteenth-century Haydn scholarship: the emphasis

placed on the change in Haydn’s music after his encounter with Mozart.

Gustav Hoecker and Leopold Schmidt were unequivocal in their view that

the most lasting part of Haydn’s repertory, particularly the later sym-

phonies and oratorios, reflected Mozartian influence. This was one way in

which Haydn’s place in the repertory continued to be justified.44 Another

way to earn Haydn a place of honour was to argue for his relation to

Beethoven. In this way, Haydn’s role as touchstone revealed him to be an

influence that was already completely absorbed.

Biographical assumptionsThe issue of greatest concern to nineteenth-century biographers was

that Haydn had not been a free artist but the servant of the aristocracy. This

point may be painfully obvious, but unfortunately it is poorly understood.

Nineteenth-century biographies of Mozart focused on his rebellion against

the Archbishop of Salzburg, as well as on his conflict with his father and the

presumed snubbing of Mozart by the Viennese aristocracy. These bio-

graphical episodes gave Mozart the aspect of a neglected Romantic genius

whose frustrations lent his music an interior depth and secret melancholy.

Such depths seemed absent from the consistently public and overt mean-

ings of Haydn. There seemed to be an inner Mozart, but commentators

either refused or failed to find significant subtexts in Haydn, a man who

wore the Esterházy livery with apparent willingness. As Wagner put it,

Haydn’s greatest achievements were his late works, written independently

of Esterházy but under foreign patronage, whereas Mozart never ‘arrived at

22

44 See Gustav Hoecker, Das Grosse Dreigestirn: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Glogau:Flemming, c. 1898), p. 130.

22


comfort: his loveliest works were written between the elation of one hour

and the anguish of the next’.45

It turns out that Haydn’s private life and the dynamics between per-

sonal happiness and the writing of music were far more interesting and

complicated than any nineteenth-century biographer was willing to

emphasize. Although both Haydn and Mozart married on the rebound, so

to speak – that is, to the sisters of the women with whom they really were in

love – the commonplaces of Haydn’s life story, as seen by the nineteenth

century,make no allowance for the image of Haydn the artist as abandoned,

lonely, troubled or psychically complex (even if Carpani, for one, was

explicit on the matter of Haydn’s unhappy marriage). His poignant

comment of 1790 to his friend Marianne von Genzinger on the restrictions

to which he had to submit – ‘it is indeed sad always to be a slave’ – was not

assimilated into a more complicated picture of Haydn’s psyche.46 The

absence of a powerful nineteenth-century biographer of the stature of Otto

Jahn (Mozart) or Alexander Wheelock Thayer (Beethoven) further rein-

forced the popular stereotypes about Haydn and helped set him apart. Carl

Ferdinand Pohl’s death in 1887 meant that the two volumes of his impor-

tant biography of Haydn (1875–82) brought Haydn up only to the end of

the Eszterháza years in 1790; the third volume, dealing with the most

popular and well-known works, had to wait until Hugo Botstiber com-

pleted the book in 1927.

But issues of Haydn’s employment and the quantity of music he wrote

remained uppermost in nineteenth-century attitudes. There seemed to be

something socially deferential and perhaps even superficial about Haydn’s

music. Obeisance to formalities and manners, to the public aspect of music

as entertainment for aristocrats, was first derided by the generation of

composers who came of age after the fall of Napoleon.Berlioz was typical in

assuming that Haydn’s music was composed as the occasion demanded,not

as the composer might have wished, and that its inner spirit was not the

result of any subjective search for self-expression. The historian and aes-

thetician Heinrich Köstlin, in his 1874 history of music, delighted in

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23

45 ‘Beethoven’, Prose Works, V, p. 88.46 Letter of 27 June 1790, in H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works II:

Haydn at Eszterháza, 1766–1790 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 745.

23


recounting that Haydn, in order to write music, first had to dress in a

socially acceptable manner and become ‘salonfähig’ (fit for the salon).47

Haydn’s status suffered from nineteenth-century aesthetic reactions to the

French Revolution, especially the effort to transform the sensibility for

music into a middle-class achievement reflective of individuality rather

than a mark of aristocratic cultivation and manners. On the other hand,

late Haydn appealed to subsequent generations of listeners, and not only

because the music appeared to conform to an evolutionary scheme of

increasing differentiation and complexity – the late Haydn was also the

Haydn emancipated, if not from his wig, at least from the Esterházy livery.

Nevertheless, the embrace of this late music by the English could not

compete with the Romantic image of Mozart as misunderstood by the

Viennese court and aristocracy. Likewise, despite the facts, Beethoven’s

eccentricities and apparent overt challenges to social conventions fitted the

Romantic prejudices, as did the myth of Schubert’s extreme poverty and

obscurity.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Wagnerian prejudice against

success in one’s own time, particularly with a philistine, self-satisfied

public,also militated against a reconsideration of Haydn.The obvious con-

trast, of course, was Beethoven, who was seen as the ambiguous, striving,

emotionally expressive Romantic artist cast adrift by society, in constant

conflict with the philistines around him. His stature grew in the later nine-

teenth century with the notion that his late music, unlike Haydn’s, had

experienced opposition and bewilderment in its time, only to be accepted

by later generations. The nineteenth century could take credit for truly

understanding Beethoven. As for Haydn, given his success in his own time,

his music could not be considered incomprehensible or opaque and thus

progressive.

One element in Haydn’s biography held unusual attraction for nine-

teenth-century attitudes, however: his origins. This was his status, unique

within the Classical pantheon, as a simple ‘man of the people’, a quality

seen as being exemplified by The Seasons. In the 1930s Ernst Kris and Otto

Kurz developed a path-breaking theory on the origins and function of the

different types of artists’ biographies. Taking their interpretative lead, we

24

47 Geschichte der Musik im Umriss (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1910), pp. 416–18.

24


can see that the accepted version of Haydn’s life story fits a familiar bio-

graphical pattern for artists that dates back to Classical antiquity. Haydn’s

story is that of the extraordinary talent fortuitously discovered, despite his

humble origins: here was a simple peasant genius who, after an early

rescue from his village by a perceptive relative (leading to the choir school

at St Stephen’s in Vienna), just happened to live in the same building in

Vienna as the famous Italian composer-conductor Nicola Porpora.

Porpora recognized the greatness of the young man and gave him his first

opportunity. Like the great painters of the Renaissance discovered by

chance, Haydn overcame the obstacles created by the poverty and obscur-

ity of his birth.48

This story held tremendous appeal for a nineteenth century nostalgic

for simpler times, before industrialization and urbanization. Mozart,

Beethoven and C. P. E. Bach all had fathers who were musicians themselves,

so they fell into the less attractive and certainly more mundane pattern of

the musician as artisan who is trained in the father’s workshop.The fact that

Haydn’s ancestors were of no social significance and had no connection to

anything artistic added an aura to his achievement. He was therefore cred-

ited with a unique capacity to speak to ordinary people.His use of the dance

and the simple tune lent him a lasting connection to an illiterate, unedu-

cated populace; he remained, rhetorically, a symbol of inspiration for the

lower classes. Félix Clément, the music historian and composer writing in

the 1860s, identified, among other virtues, Haydn’s remarkable discipline

and capacity for and devotion to work as part of his idealized image: an

example that contrasted sharply with the self-indulgent modern pseudo-

artistic personality.49

This helps to explain recurrent references by nineteenth-century

critics to the folk roots of Haydn’s music and his use of apparently

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25

48 See Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch (Vienna: Krystall-verlag, 1934; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995). The tradition of biography for thegreat visual artists was well developed, owing to the work of Vasari. In responseto the growing audience for music, it was only in the nineteenth century that acomparable popular and general formula for composers came into being. It isironic that Haydn had a partial unexpected benefit from the new industry ofmusician biographies that took its cue from the visual arts.

49 Les Musiciens célèbres depuis le seizième siècle jusqu’à nos jours, 2nd edn(Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1873), p. 121.

25


Hungarian, Croatian and Austro-German folk material.50 The dance

rhythms and vitality of his music were readily associated with glorified

memories of a fast-vanishing village and rural culture. Haydn’s many

dances for courtly consumption had no place in this account, but his

acknowledged capacity for wit was incorporated into the general line of

argument. By the 1820s the urban, middle-class artist and his audience had

begun to romanticize the rural world as a place of cheerfulness, happiness,

innocence and vitality: precisely the terms associated with Haydn’s music.

The misreading of Rousseau and the distinction between nature and

civilization assisted in the nineteenth-century reception of Haydn as, iron-

ically, the least artificial and the most natural of all composers.

The Seasons helped to make this point for the nineteenth century. In a

great work of music, Haydn managed to ennoble the simple people, the

ordinary landscape and daily life. This populist affinity, which was not

evident in The Creation, made The Seasons a potent symbol.51 Since

naturalness, however attractive, was no longer accessible to artists trapped

in the lonely spaces of the nineteenth-century urban European world,

Haydn became a bittersweet vehicle of nostalgia and a remembrance of

things long past.52 This point was underscored by the sustained popularity

of The Seasons in the programmes of choral societies.

The demise of philosophical musicPartly because of this ‘simple peasant’ myth, it has been assumed that

Haydn, unlike Beethoven or most subsequent composers, was poorly edu-

cated and had very little interest in matters literary or philosophical.53

26

50 Laurence Berman, The Musical Image: A Theory of Content (Westport, Conn.:Greenwood, 1993), pp. 182–5.

51 See H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works V: Haydn: The LateYears: 1801–1809 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).

52 It is not surprising, therefore, that in this context that runs from E. T. A.Hoffman to Hanslick, there is a curious absence of sympathy for Haydn’sreligious music. It seemed too mundane and earthbound; see Charlton, E. T. A.Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, pp. 370–1.

53 See László Somfai, Joseph Haydn: His Life in Contemporary Pictures (New York:Taplinger, 1969); and, in contrast, James Webster, Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphonyand the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration inhis Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

26


Mozart’s letters reveal an individual with a profound and reflective intelli-

gence. Beethoven’s intellectual ambitions were never doubted and were

confirmed by his library. Though Haydn’s music, particularly his operas,

amply satisfies a search for a connection between music and ideas, his

ambiguous legacy as an opera composer and the absence of a compelling

written record of the order of the Mozart letters have helped to obscure his

view of music and musical meaning.

However,as recent scholars have made clear,Haydn was engaged with

the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and the intersection

between art and morality, even beyond his statement that he had often

‘tried to portray moral characters in his symphonies’.54 The conception of a

piece of instrumental music as making a philosophical argument recogniz-

able and significant from the point of view of the listener was not part of the

Romantic complex of listening habits, but it was integral to Haydn’s work

from the 1760s and 1770s on and particularly to his late instrumental

music, the work most familiar in the nineteenth century.

Haydn’s achievement lay in the creation of music that fulfils, perhaps

as closely as any, an eighteenth-century theoretical view of what music

should be as an art form, especially in contrast to painting. Insofar as music

was not about any form of imitation or, as Adam Smith put it, the ‘reflective

disposition of another person’, it was abstract – in effect, the closest equiva-

lent to pure thought and self-reflection. Smith argued that instrumental

music was ‘a complete and regular system’, that it filled up ‘completely the

whole capacity of the mind so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for

thinking of anything else. . . . The mind in reality enjoys . . . a very high intel-

lectual pleasure, not unlike that which it derives from the contemplation of

a great system in any other science.’55

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27

54 Haydn’s remark to his biographer Griesinger, from the latter’s BiographischeNotizen über Joseph Haydn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1810), in VernonGotwals, trans., Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits (Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 62. See David P. Schroeder, Haydn and theEnlightenment: The Late Symphonies and their Audience (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1990); Elaine R. Sisman, ‘Haydn’s Theater Symphonies’, Journal of theAmerican Musicological Society 43 (1990), 292–352; and Webster, Haydn’s‘Farewell’ Symphony.

55 Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce(Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 171–3.

27


The sense of total engagement that results in a welcome and satisfac-

tory emotional and aesthetic conclusion aptly characterizes the response to

Haydn’s music in London.56 It fits Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime as

‘astonishment’, with gradations including awe and terror. The power of the

sublime was that it ‘entirely filled the mind’ with its object. By virtue of its

temporality, its creation of tension through sound,and the impact of vibra-

tions on the body, music created the possibility of ‘a succession of great

parts’, a vehicle that could instil emotionally a sense of vastness and great-

ness and thus create the ‘artificial infinite’.Music can ‘anticipate our reason-

ings,and hurries us on by an irresistible force’.57 This is a virtual description

of the role of expectation and memory in listening to Haydn’s late sym-

phonies. Haydn’s music satisfied the expectation put forward by Christian

Gottfried Körner, who applied to music his friend Schiller’s idea of an aes-

thetic education. Körner argued that to achieve a sense of beauty through

music, the ear had to be trained. If music was to achieve its goals as an

instrument of beauty and ultimately ethical ennoblement, the listener

needed to have an understanding capable of discriminating form within

the sounds of instrumental music. This required explicit instruction.

Precisely because music ‘forgoes the advantages of the other arts’ and in

effect ‘gives us nothing to think about’,whatever meaning we are able to find

in it is of a high order, since it is created freely by us, the listeners. Music,

when given form, shapes its own visceral emotional power into self-

sufficiency, permitting the composer and listener to invest music with

order,clarity and wide-ranging meaning.58

Music as an art was the taming of the acknowledged emotional power

of hearing and sound. The eighteenth century placed a premium not only

on form but on the symbolic achievement of resolution within the musical

28

56 See Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 92–156.

57 On the Sublime and Beautiful (London: private print, 1812; facsimile print,Charlottesville: Ibis Publishing, n. d.), pp. 202, 234–5. It should be noted thatthe use of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke in this discussion is explicitlyjustified by the fact that Haydn read Smith and Burke; copies of the relevantworks by both authors were in his library. See Sisman, Haydn and his World,pp. 420–1 of the Appendix.

58 ‘Über Charakterdarstellung in der Musik’, in Aesthetische Schriften, ed. JosephP. Bauke (Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1964), pp. 24–8, 45–8.

28


experience. Resolution meant the reconciling of the disparate and

conflicting elements of an emotional experience, as mirrored by contrasts

in the music. The sublime and the beautiful could be achieved through a

formal structure that was designed around music’s ‘regaining the home

tonic’, as Körner put it. In his later symphonies, Haydn revealed what David

P. Schroeder has described as the capacity not only to ‘persuade’ but to

engage the listener in a unique and powerful emotional narrative that

finally becomes a philosophical and cognitive experience.59

The much-talked-about link in eighteenth-century philosophy

between truth and beauty rested in part on the capacity of the perceiver to

recognize and respond to intrinsic structural parallels between truth and

beauty. As Zelter wrote to Goethe in 1826, Haydn’s works ‘are the ideal lan-

guage of truth . . . they might be exceeded but never surpassed. His genius is

nothing less than the expression of a soul born free, clear, and innocent.’60 If

the discovery of clear, consistent and complete laws lay beneath the

differentiated and imperfect appearance of nature as understood by

Newton and Locke, then the perception of beauty in music composed, as

well as music perceived by the listener, required the working-out and

recognition of the musical argument. That argument, in turn, had to reflect

laws analogous to those of the mind and the physical universe. The praise

lavished on Locke and Newton for revealing the laws of nature and human

understanding framed the objective for instrumental music.A Haydn sym-

phony therefore became a philosophical argument whose command of the

sense of beauty and the sublime, the rational and the emotional, mirrored

back to the listener through total engagement in the moment of hearing

(associationist connections with the extra-musical included, as in Haydn’s

‘The Storm’) the fundamental coincidence of truthfulness and rationality

in the world and in the mind.

For the eighteenth-century connoisseur, hearing a Haydn symphony

was a way not into subjectivity, but a way to transcend subjectivity. Music’s

abstract language permitted the experience of the sublime and the beauti-

ful that issued from the recognition of moral truth inherent in all parts of

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29

59 See Haydn and the Enlightenment. See also the essay by Mark Evan Bonds,‘The Symphony as Pindaric Ode’, in Sisman, Haydn and his World, pp. 131–53.

60 Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter, II, 1799–1827, ed. Max Hecker(Frankfurt: Insel, 1987), p. 473.

29


the universe. The English audience that heard Haydn’s symphonies in the

late eighteenth century had known how to appreciate his quite religiously

based ambition to realize in music a medium for philosophical and moral

contemplation. As Burke and Smith recognized, such an ambition

demanded music’s access to both the sensual and the intellectual, the emo-

tional and the rational, the sublime and the beautiful. It is a tribute to the

symmetry of history that Kant’s synthesis of these issues in The Critique of

Judgement first appeared and was read widely in the same decade during

which Haydn wrote his greatest works.

The nineteenth century, in contrast, had lost fundamental sympathy

for this rational philosophical project. As a result, it found the music of

Haydn cold, lacking in the human qualities most often linked to the percep-

tion of subjectivity. Mozart and Beethoven, never identified in the same

way as part of the eighteenth-century rage for music as a philosophical

system, did not suffer the same fate. As the nineteenth century evolved, it

took its cue from Herder’s perception that the indeterminate and darker

nature of music deprived it of its immediate function as a symbolic system

of morality. For the Romantics, the boundlessness of music was connected

to a non-rational act of imagination conceived as the subjective trans-

formation of experience; they posited an ontology and ultimately a cultural

conception of music radically different from the assumptions under which

Haydn worked. The underlying culture now rejected the idea of music as a

complete philosophical system; and so the genuine pleasure afforded by the

philosophical contemplation of music, at which Haydn excelled, became a

lost habit.Both the music of Haydn and the idea of reason behind it suffered

in the nineteenth-century dichotomy between emotion and reason, the

rational and irrational, and the collapse of the eighteenth-century

philosophical psychology of rationality and enlightenment.

The ideology of connoisseurship and the need for anormative ClassicismIf nineteenth-century music critics were keenly aware of Haydn’s pre-

sumed status as a servant composing on demand at the behest of the aris-

tocracy, they were equally conscious of the transformation of the audience

and the public role of music in their own time. Because they assumed that

the sensibility towards music resided within the perceiver as well as the

30

30


creator, they considered the consciousness of the listener crucial. As the

century developed, the evolution of a refined musical consciousness was

soon linked to the ideal of Bildung, or self-cultivation, as once exemplified

exclusively by the cultivated aristocrat.61 Although the aristocrat as

employer was easily vilified, the aristocrat as connoisseur became idealized.

Bildung emerged as an ambivalent category of middle-class self-assertion,

ambition and insecurity.

The formation of the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna during

the Napoleonic era represented an unusual alliance between the high aris-

tocracy and an elite middle class. In Vienna the Society became the basis of

an ever-expanding world of participants in musical life who took on roles as

amateurs, patrons and listeners. The explosion of the choral movement in

the 1840s and 1850s mirrored the further growth of public musical life in

German-speaking Europe. Musical culture on the Continent, especially in

Paris and Vienna during the 1830s and 1840s, generally approximated to

the scale of public musical life that Haydn encountered in London in the

early 1790s. Before 1848, during the period of restoration, this new musical

public constituted a mix of an old aristocracy and an urban middle class.

Within the new non-aristocratic public, music benefited from its heritage

as a form of aristocratic entertainment. Arno Mayer has argued that the

values of the old regime were never entirely displaced during the nine-

teenth century, despite the radical political and economic changes (and

Marxist ideas about cultural formation).62 Music constitutes a powerful

case in point. Self-cultivation, as an ideal of middle-class education,

involved approximating and appropriating the connoisseurship that was

historically associated with Nicolaus Esterházy. The discerning listener

assumed through culture the pose and manner of the eighteenth-century

aristocrat.

This nineteenth-century ideology of connoisseurship depended on

the creation of a normative Classical past,one historically linked to an era of

aristocratic privilege in which music was a narrowly distributed and highly

-

31

61 See Kevin Barry, Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics andPoetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987), pp. 1–27.

62 The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: CroomHelm, 1981).

31


refined social instrument and ritual.At the same time, a set of new expecta-

tions was placed on the music of the present. These new expectations,

which we usually identify as characteristic of Romanticism, defined new

music as emerging from Beethoven, the composer who extended the nor-

mative procedures of a Classicism associated with a closed circle of aristo-

crats into a language accessible to the educated individual, irrespective of

social origins.

From the beginning of the Romantic era, an uneasy tension existed

between the demand that music be understood as an independent, abstract

form of communication and the thought that music possessed a deep rela-

tionship to some psychological geography of human expressiveness and

inner reflection. Music-making and listening became analogous to the

experience of reading alone. Precisely because of this analogy to reading,

music had to connect with the subjective imagination in a way that reflected

itself in so-called non-musical meanings, either of narration or representa-

tion.

This was true of instrumental music as much as vocal. Beethoven was

clearly a composer of drama and rhetoric, in which the gestures of instru-

mental music in relation to extra-musical meaning seemed profound but

unstable.63 The widely held Wagnerian perception that Mozart’s genius lay

in his operas and vocal music led to the idea that his instrumental music

also had a vocal and therefore human cast to it. Because of this, its line and

structure were susceptible to Romantic listening: one could hear in Mozart

an interior narrative. In Haydn, on the other hand, there seemed to be only

the playfulness of sound. That Haydn was a composer of drama and

rhetoric was a view that lay in the past – and future.

The perception of the absence of extra-musical profundity in

Haydn’s instrumental music, despite its acknowledged exemplary virtuos-

ity in techniques of musical elaboration, transformation and variation, has

remained almost second-nature throughout the history of Haydn recep-

tion. Here biography and social history intersect. Being cheerful and telling

jokes that result from the virtuosic manipulation of self-consciously simple

32

63 See George Barth, The Pianist as Orator (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992);and Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of theOration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

32


building-blocks did not satisfy the expectation of inner boundlessness.

However, it did seem to fit the desire for entertainment associated with a

discredited historical elite – and to satisfy a later generation’s sense of its

sophisticated musical and aesthetic judgement. Understanding Haydn was

considered a mark of cultivation, a prior condition to being able to discern

truth in one’s own time. Since Beethoven had to be saved from philistine

reductionism, it was critical that he be evaluated not just in emotional

terms, but through a recognition of his greatness in purely musical terms –

that is, in relation to the procedures established by Haydn. Just as Haydn

was understood as a necessary precursor to Beethovenian Romanticism,

the individual in the cultivation of his own taste had to recapitulate the

encounter with Haydn, and therefore the formal language of music that lay

beneath any attempt at expressiveness. Thus elevated into the model of

pure formalism, Haydn could not help but fail to capture the imagination

of the new kind of listener.

Meanwhile, Haydn’s great oratorios remained beloved as works in

which amateurs could participate. Despite the greatness of the music con-

tained in them, the extra-musical aspects of The Creation and The Seasons

seemed mere surface phenomena that did not disturb the formal integrity

of the compositional method. The same was alleged with respect to the

symphonies with descriptive titles. The moments of illustration in which

Haydn indulged were no longer controversial, but obvious; and whatever

deeper extra-musical intent Haydn wished to convey was no longer inter-

esting or audible.64 Joachim singled out Haydn’s Adagios because they

sounded the most like Mozart and Beethoven. Slow movements in Haydn

seemed most susceptible to the highly prized habits of subjective

appropriation. The outer movements of the sonatas, quartets and sym-

phonies appeared as cheerful formal exercises that established the essential

normative rules of future musical games and communication. Haydn had

become the law-giver of Classicism.

The cultural conservatives of the 1840s and 1850s failed to realize

that, in rescuing the formal part of the eighteenth-century musical tradi-

-

33

64 See the telling analysis of Haydn’s programme music (in which only the SevenLast Words of Christ is taken seriously) in Friedrich Niecks, Programme Music inthe Last Four Centuries (London: Novello, 1906), pp. 73–8.

33


tion, they were abandoning the philosophical ambitions from which it had

sprung. In order to rethink Haydn, the stubborn veneer of nineteenth-

century habits of reception, which have extended well into this century,

must be dissolved and scraped away. When we try to understand Haydn

from the perspective of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth,

we rapidly realize that Haydn’s music carried for its listeners and contem-

poraries gravity, philosophical depth, passion and complex beauty. His

formal achievements, celebrated as such by nineteenth-century criticism,

engendered in his own lifetime precisely that emotionally intense response

later generations considered somehow missing.65 And this means, of

course, that formal achievements – as Haydn himself did not fail to point

out – were never only what Haydn was about.

34

65 Compare the enthusiastic and perceptive reaction by the painter Philipp OttoRunge (1777–1810) to the symbolism of the The Seasons, quoted in Le Hurayand Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,p. 522.

34


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